The Info Center was developed to fill a common need. During a rollout, users typically go through well constructed training sessions and will usually walk away with training materials, quick reference guides, etc. However, once the system has been in production for a while, people rarely ever reference that material again. When people have questions, the answers can be hard to find in the training materials. Training materials are typically not organized to answer specific questions that arise.

Why not have a place where you can publish the answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)? You could do this on your company intranet or in a document, but why not use Salesforce.com and allow the business the ability to manage the content themselves? Enter the Info Center.

It is only available as a Test Drive right now, but I am very interested in your feedback. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on:

Would this be a useful tool to have within Salesforce.com? (it would be free)

Are Messages, FAQs and Links core items that need to be communicated? Any others?

How is the user experience?

Is the performance acceptable? It is a little slow to load, but once loaded it responds very well. Is that acceptable from your point of view?

What would you do differently? How would you improve it?

If you had it in Salesforce.com, would you use it? Do you think your users would respond to it?

Please take the Test Drive and provide your feedback as comments on this post or on my support page. I loaded the test drive with content to answer the Frequently Asked Questions about the Info Center. I’ll let the Info Center explain what the Info Center does!

I like the clean, lightweight user interface in the test drive.
I found it easy to use right away – a good sign, although I’m a techie.
At a glance, I wonder how you would would scale up to hundreds
of items in dozens of sections. I hope you keep the clean interface rather than adding hierarchy levels. A nice touch would be to collapse and expand a section (or all sections) so you can see all sections with minmal scrolling. You’ll ultimately need search for large numbers of items, perhaps augmented by tags. I wished I could’ve tried editing because you support rich text editing and would like to have seen the editor you use.

[…] Scott Hemeter has built out an application called the Info Center: The Info Center was developed to fill a common need. During a rollout, users typically go through well constructed training sessions and will usually walk away with training materials, quick reference guides, etc. However, once the system has been in production for a while, people rarely ever reference that material again. When people have questions, the answers can be hard to find in the training materials. Training materials are typically not organized to answer specific questions that arise. […]

Chris Murphy Said,

This is a great application. Since it’s used for roll-outs you may want to bring the link onto each standard page. I’m thinking of an image icon with their company logo. Than a user could click to open a “mini-infocenter” displaying info specific to the record they called the s-control from.

Chris Said,

The body of the messages and FAQs are stored in Long Text Area fields in Salesforce.com. There is no editor to enter the HTML. By default, the field is put within a < p > tag when viewing it within the Info Center. I entered in the HTML by hand. You can see what a record looks like by viewing it within the normal page layout. In that mode, you see the HTML as entered.

Occasionally, I’d use an editor to help me out. I use Xinha Here, a Firefox plug-in when I need to know the syntax for something.

However, the editors add so much undesired HTML that it makes it worse. I like to do it by hand.

Scott Hemmeter at the CRM Consulting Service ArrowPointe recently posted on his blog Perspectives on Salesforce.com a blog entry about a freely available S-Control he developed that he’s calling Info Center . Scott’s description of how an organizatio…

I updated the functionality to allow for collapsible sections on FAQs and Links. When viewing the Info Center now, all sections are expanded by default. Clicking the – icon will collapse that section and the icon will change to a +.